Thanks for coming to my session! I’d love to get feedback about anything you try, especially the Desmos version of the Types of Triangles activities – it’s my first Desmos activity, so be brutal. Really! I’m ready to write version 2.

If there is something I told you I’d include here that I forgot to add, let me know.

Time for a guest blog post! Emily Payán is a beginning teacher at a high needs elementary school in a large suburban school district north of Minneapolis. Her mother, Margaret Williams, is the district’s Teaching and Learning Specialist for K-2 Math. Margaret is also an adjunct instructor for a local university and happened to be Emily’s Math Methods instructor. I know Margaret because she is part of the Minnesota “math family” that I’ve gotten to know while serving on the leadership team for Math On-a-Stick at the Minnesota State Fair. As a prelude to inviting me to lead a day of professional development for all the K-5 teachers in her district this August, she buttered me up by telling me this great story about the huge effect my advice from the previous August had had on her daughter’s experience teaching kindergarten. I replied, “Sure, I’ll do the PD, but you and Emily have to write up your story and I’ll post it on my blog.” All parties kept up their end of the bargain, and here’s what they wrote.

Margaret: I was looking forward to hanging out with Annie while volunteering at Math on a Stick during the 2016 MN State Fair. My daughter, Emily, had just finished her first year of teaching. Her second graders made wonderful progress in math but, as is often the way for beginning teachers, she was being moved to kindergarten. Being able to talk with Annie and get suggestions regarding the K math experience was going to be awesome!

Emily: To say I was nervous would be an understatement. I had completed my student teaching in a kindergarten classroom in a neighboring district. In this classroom, worksheets were the modus operandi and manipulatives were frowned upon. Needless to say, I had no idea where to start or what skills to engender in my new students to set them up for success in their schooling.

Margaret: Right! It was frustrating for me, as her mentor, to see and hear how the student teaching experience had been. Once she had her own classroom, we worked together a lot in planning math lessons for second grade using a Cognitively Guided Instruction framework for implementing Everyday Math. What would that look like in kindergarten? I was excited to talk to Annie. I was pretty sure I knew what she would say: The children should have lots and lots of opportunities to count collections. I was wrong. When Annie and I had a chance to talk, she told me that the most important thing Emily could do, as a K teacher, was to hold her students accountable for making sense.

Emily: While this made sense for a mathematician of any age, I had to wonder How on earth do I start when only three of these students have had a preschool experience? Less than half of my class exhibited predictors that would indicate foundational skills and concepts for number sense and future success in mathematics. My mom’s Math Methods course included lots of conversations around Boaler and Dweck’s work regarding mindsets and mathematics. I knew that if I could just get these kids to engage in real world math without the fear of mistakes, they would be successful and confident – regardless of what their initial assessments indicated.

My mom helped me collect items such as buttons, pine cones and blocks as well as pictures of real world things that would be interesting to five year olds: puppies, turkeys, plants (after all, math is EVERYWHERE!). I also used resources from Christopher Danielson. His book, Which One Doesn’t Belong and his open-ended approach to counting in picture books inspired my students to value multiple perspectives and to think of math as a creative domain. Trying to pull all this together felt overwhelming. Looking back, I think this was good. It wasn’t long before these “struggling” kindergarteners were mathematizing the world around them and, just as importantly, talking about their thinking. They were all in.

Conversations started flowing as they worked through their reasoning. I challenged them with simple questions like, How do you know?, Do you agree with what Ylva said? Giving an answer wasn’t enough, they had to be able to talk the class through their thinking. Sometimes the justification didn’t make sense to someone and they began to (respectfully) challenge one another and ask questions of their classmates. It was fantastic! I had eighteen 5 and 6-year-olds engaging in deep, meaningful questions about all types of mathematical tasks: addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.

This means that mistakes were inevitable. I intentionally modeled making mistakes and talked about Boaler and Dweck’s research on the brain growth that happens when a mistake is made and thought through. We watched videos on synapses and even had class meetings in which we all shared something from the day that was challenging. We congratulated each other on making our brains stronger by ‘sticking with it’ and not giving up. By the middle of the year, excitement beamed across their faces when a mistake was made. They knew that this meant they were on to something, and they accepted the challenge.

For example, my mom (known in my classroom as “Nana Math”) had taken a picture of a group of turkeys and sent it to my class to think about what was mathematical. Autumn decided she would count the legs of the birds – three turkeys were standing and two were sitting. Counting the legs she saw, she decided there were five legs. Dakota studied the photo a little more and thoughtfully explained, “I think there are more legs, Autumn. I think there are legs we can’t see. Each turkey should have 2 legs, right?”

Margaret: These little problem solvers were on fire. It was amazing to listen to them explain their thinking. I would go into Emily’s classroom to help with assessment interviews and wonder when was I going to get to the low achieving students. These kids were confident and supportive of each other even though they often challenged each other’s ideas. It was a math teacher’s paradise! Emily will be teaching Grade 2 this coming year. We look forward to another year of focusing on reasoning and making sense!

I can’t wait to hear about Emily’s second grade experience this year when I see Margaret again next summer in Minnesota. Maybe she’ll send me some updates before then. And by the way, y’all should come join us at Math On-a-Stick!

Next Sunday, I’m the “visiting artist” at Christopher Danielson’s Math On-a-Stick booth at the Minnesota State Fair. This means I get to plan an arty-mathy activity for kids of all ages and help them do it for four hours. Coloring is always popular, so I have been thinking about coloring quilt blocks, where either the color makes the design visible, or where all the blocks are the same, but the final “quilt” depends on how you arrange those blocks. Then I also started thinking about frieze patterns – these are basically designs that use rigid transformations (such as reflection, translation, rotation, or glide reflection) to create a design that continues infinitely in one dimension, so something that could go around the edge of a bowl, say, or as a wallpaper border (not as actual wallpaper – that’s a different family of symmetries).

My vague criteria for the activity:

Relatively easy to explain, and doesn’t require constant attention from knowledgeable helpers (I’ll have three or four volunteer helpers, who don’t have to know any math)

Could have some examples or diagrams available for the more self-directed

Doesn’t take a wicked long time to accomplish something, but could go on for a while (low floor, high ceiling, that sort of thing)

Is fun and art-y

Involves some math, even if it’s not obvious to everyone

Could be something they take with them, or leave to display in our area, maybe hanging on a fence

Here’s what I’m thinking about so far.

One idea was a double Tumbling Blocks quilt pattern. It’s not that exciting, since it’s basically coloring by numbers – you pick a light, medium, and dark color, and color the chunks numbered 1, 2, and 3 respectively. The pattern would be half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. See below, plus the “finished” product if we put a bunch of them together.

Another option is the Rail Fence quilt pattern. Again, not very exciting to color, but fun to see how it looks as a “quilt” depending on how you put them together. I’d provide two different half-sheet templates with six to 10 squares on them – one that is arranged in the zigzag, and the other in the pinwheel.

But the more I think about this, the more I’m thinking I might do frieze patterns. I’ve done an activity with them before, where we learned about them, then acted them out physically, and then made them using The Geometer’s Sketchpad software (read about the time we did it with the Drexel Math Contest, and even download the instructions). We could for sure have groups of people acting them out with guidance – we have plenty of room. But I haven’t done the arty-y part with paper and markers before. I wonder how that would work? I sketched out a couple of possible templates – one of triangles, one just squares, both on about a 2″ strip. There are four examples in this picture, then a picture (with a link to a PDF) of all seven types of frieze patterns with their John Conway-given names.

That’s where I’m at right now, and am looking forward to getting some ideas from y’all. I know, especially, that I’ve missed something with the quilt blocks and coloring/symmetry, and am wondering if anyone else has done a frieze pattern coloring activity. Thanks in advance for your contributions!

Thanks to all of you for digging in and doing some math with me (and with your partners!). Conversations with a number of you after, and attempting to read through the #descon17 tweets during the talk, tell me that many of you walked away thinking about at least one pretty profound thing. Awesome!

As promised, here are PDFs of the slides and the handout, plus links to the technology. Yes, I’m even including a link to the third app that we didn’t get to that goes with the last page of the handout. If you want to know more, let me know and I’ll tell you more. (I’ll make you curious by saying that it’s a vending machine on an alien planet.)

Last Thursday started out like so many have in the last 20+ years. I logged into our Problems of the Week site, preparing to read through the student submissions to one of our Current PoWs so that I could choose some to include with the commentary I write. Last week I was doing the Geometry Problem of the Week. And as has happened on almost every “Geometry Thursday” in the last 20+ years, I saw this name in the group of people who were the first people to look at the problem when it was available on our site:

Gordon has been using our Problems of the Week for many years. Here’s a snippet from an email he sent me in November of 2010:

Hi, Annie. I am still teaching here in Oklahoma. I just thought I would touch base. […] How are things with you? It has been a while since Swarthmore and only the Geometry PoW.

A while, indeed! We started the Geometry PoW in 1993, and added the Elementary PoW (since renamed the Math Fundamentals PoW) a couple of years later. In November 2014 Gordon wrote:

Hi Annie,
It has been a long time since we have been able to chat a bit about teaching and math. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that we meet in person at NCTM in San Diego [in 1996]. I could finally put a face with someone I had communicated with online. Over the years I have posted almost all of the PoWs on my bulletin board.

Somewhere there is probably a picture of Gordon and me from that San Diego meeting. I did find two pictures of us from subsequent NCTM Annual Meetings.

San Francisco 1999

Chicago 2000

(Yes, in the San Francisco picture I am dressed as an anonymous superhero. Ask me about it sometime.)

Gordon hasn’t had many students submit to our problems online, but for many years, he has had a bulletin board outside his classroom where students could get the problems and then give a solution to him for extra credit. The only students of his who consistently submitted online were his three children. Oldest child Gordon Jr. started submitting in 1996 when he was a senior in high school (and continued during his first year of college). Middle child Mike started in 1998, and youngest Regina started in 2005.

In the spring of Gordon Jr.’s senior year of high school, we used a question about how to make a hexagonal cross section of the cube. In my commentary about the solutions we received, I wrote, “There were some innovative methods used to find the hexagon. Berno W. says he used a potato. Gordon Bockus went out to the woodshop and built the figure.” The next April, at the NCTM Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., Gordon Sr. stopped by our booth in the exhibit hall and said, “I have something for you. Gordon Jr. wanted me to give you this.” Out of his bag, he pulled Gordon Jr.’s sliced cube! As you can see, he had written on it, “I know it’s not regular, but it pointed me in the right direction. Gordon Bockus Jr.” It has lived on my desk every since.

Gordon Jr.'s Sliced Cube

Gordon would occasionally submit his own solutions to problems, telling me why he liked them, describing how he was going to use them with his students, or asking a question about a problem or its extra question. The bulletin board persisted. In his November 2010 email, he told me how his two boys (by then both married with kids) were doing, and said, “Whenever one of them visits me at school, they see the PoWs up on the bulletin board and they ask if Annie is still involved.” In that email he also mentioned retirement, but added, “I don’t know when that will happen. I don’t know what I would do in place of teaching.”

In November of 2014 he wrote, “Retirement is on my mind but I don’t think I can go quietly. So I might be around another year.” Well, here we are, three years later, and Gordon is in fact retiring at the end of this school year. And he’s going out with a bang, as his Academic Team won the Oklahoma State Championship in February and Gordon was named Oklahoma Academic Competition Association Coach of the Year for the second time (he also helped start academic bowl competitions in Oklahoma).

This means that starting this fall, I’ll no longer see Gordon’s name at the top of the submission queue on Thursdays, and I’ll miss that reminder of our long friendship and his years as a devoted Problem of the Week user. However, as I wrote in email to Gordon last spring, Gordon Jr.’s sliced cube will always have a prominent place on my desk. It represents the great connections that I’ve made throughout the years with Gordon and his children, as well as many other students and teachers, and also ways in which students explore math that go above and beyond what we might expect.

Thank you, Gordon, for being a member of our community for so many years and for sharing your love of mathematics with so many students. Enjoy retirement!

Tuesday night I played music at a barbecue joint near my house with my friends Jean and Sue. We’re called Just Roses & Friends, and I’m the “& Friends”, as Jean and Sue have played together for a while. Sue holds everything together with the guitar, Jean provides almost all the vocals, and I muddle along on the bass. My contributions run the gamut from not great to pretty good, depending on the song. We’re playing every Tuesday night this summer.

Jean and Sue and I all live in the same very small town. It’s four blocks by four blocks, or about 0.14 square miles. I met them five years ago when I learned they were hosting a monthly women’s music circle in Sue’s basement. (In fact, I logged onto Facebook just now to get the awesome Miss Piggy poster, and the first thing I see is Facebook telling me that Jean and I have been friends on Facebook for five years, and that we should celebrate our friendversary!) Other than playing music with my family and a couple of brief stints in ensembles in college, I haven’t played with other people since high school. I am a passable guitar player and singer, and would much rather play with other people than by myself, so I started going. I knew Jean’s name because I had been feeding her cat, Blake, on my back deck for years, but I’d never met her in person.

At a music circle, you basically go around in a circle, with each person picking and (usually) leading a song, either a favorite, or an original, or whatever. Many circles have pretty strict protocols around who joins in on songs and who gets to solo and who gets to sing harmony and what sorts of songs are appropriate and how much chitchat is allowed pre- and post-song. None of those things are bad, but they can make joining a circle a little scary for newcomers, especially those who aren’t as musically experienced.

Sue and Jean wanted to have a circle that was much more inviting for beginners and others who don’t “play out” (in front of other people, like in a bar or coffeeshop), was a little more free-form, and was only for women (or “gurls”, as we call ourselves). They have succeeded in spades! We’re not big on protocol, and pretty much anything goes. Some of the women play in public a lot, some have never sung in front of anyone but their family, and everyone else is somewhere in between. We even have people who just come to listen, or take pictures and post them to Facebook (hi, Carolyn!). We bring snacks and drinks, talk about kids and weddings and concerts we’ve been to, and play a lot of music. Someone might say, “Hey, can I….?” and the answer is always, “Hey, it’s Gurls Circle, so do whatever you want!” Sometimes as few as two people come (we called it The Annie and Sue Show), other times we have as many as 15. You never know who’s going to show up and what songs they’re going to lead. As far as I’m concerned, it is awesome.

Long story short, I ended up getting an electric bass and started playing that at Gurls Circle. I wasn’t that good or creative, but I had played a little bluegrass bass in high school, and I play well with others (by which I mean I can keep a beat and am good at following other people playing guitar). I got better at executing my limited skill set, even though I only played once a month at our circle.

A couple of years ago, Jean and Sue invited me to join them for a gig at a small coffeeshop, then they invited me to play with them at an open mic night they were running at a cafe. Sue invited me to play some bluegrass with her and her husband, who is a banjo player, and last summer we played bluegrass at the local farmers’ market. Jean, Sue, and I also played at the farmers’ market. This winter, I played with both “pairs” at our town music night.

This spring, Jean announced that we would be playing at a local barbecue joint every Tuesday this summer. The three of us would play from 5:30 to 8:30, with a break in the middle, during which another woman musician that Jean invites would play a short set. We played our first night on June 21.

Photo by Carolyn Miller

When making the set list for this past Tuesday, Jean suggested that I take the lead and sing a few of the songs I sing at music circle. This week, Sue and I played through the break, accompanying the guest artist, Nikki, while Jean sang some harmonies. Then Nikki joined us at the end of the night to sing our last few songs. We were also joined for the whole night by Jean’s congo teacher, Karen Smith.

If you are still reading, you may well be wondering what on earth this has to do with math education, so here goes. As I was practicing with Sue and Jean this past Monday, I realized, “They’ve invited me. I’m now part of this local music party. I feel welcomed. I feel valued. This is exactly what Kaneka was talking about in her ShadowCon16 talk!”

Honestly, it was almost an overwhelming realization, that Jean and Sue have done for me (and other women) in music what I’ve always tried to do in math, and what we all need to be conscious of doing more. If you belong to a community that you value and that values you, you invite other people to join in and participate. The math community, or the “party”, isn’t any different. Just like any community, those of us who are active need to invite and nurture new members. We need to help people realize and understand that they belong and they have something to offer. Watch Kaneka’s video for more.

After we finished playing Tuesday night, we were all sitting at a table, eating our barbecue (free food and drinks for the band? I’m in!) and talking about how much fun it had been to all play together. I jumped in and said, “Hey, if I may be reflective for a minute.” I briefly told the story of Kaneka’s ShadowCon talk. Much like you were probably wondering why I was writing about music, I’m sure they were wondering why I was talking about some math thing! Then I explained the parallels that I saw in these two situations, and expressed my gratitude to them for inviting me to the party.

I added, “You know, this is so important to me, I’m going to write about it and share it with my math peeps.” They asked if they could read it when I was done, and I said, “Sure, I’ve got a blog. I’ll make sure to send you the link.” (Yes, we finally got access to our blogs after The Long Transition.) So here it is.

As we were carrying the last few things to the car a little later, I said to Jean, “You know, I meant what I said. I really am grateful to you guys for inviting me and letting me play with you.”

Jean’s reply was better than any conclusion I could write to this story. She said, “Well, inviting people to do the next thing is the only way we all grow and get better.”